Rural Peoples - Mobilizing Against the Dispossession of the Commons

28 September 2017
by
FIAN

While neo-liberalism has created an acute crisis around the world,
its agrarian variant has turned rural areas into a grand arena of
capitalist accumulation in newer ways. It purchases (or acquires with
the collusion of the state) peasants’ land at throwaway prices;
enforces contract farming; promotes the cultivation of
capital-intensive high-value farm products where billions do not even
have access to rice/wheat or other staple diet or potable water. The
huge agribusiness that thrives on the sale of seeds, etc. to peasants
also patents indigenous knowledge of the rural communities and
thereby, ruin their lives. This whole system has created a chronic
rural crisis of a different kind manifested by the tremendous wave of
forced migrations towards the towns from the countryside.

The rural categories of people mentioned in the following article -
that we are glad to publish – are sections of the oppressed class
exploited by global capitalism. We strongly believe that the rural
population has no other option to set itself free from the bondages
without being part of the class struggle against the capitalists,
globally. We salute their struggles.